Early Warning

“Oh, nothing much,” said Arthur. “I accompanied him to the entrance of the building. I could hardly keep up with him. We chatted. He was from Boston, gone to Yale, worked at Harvard. Very ambitious for a dog, I thought. I decided that it was just the Boston accent that was putting me off. When we arrived, I could see immediately that they knew him perfectly well at the Department of State.”

Long pause.

“What did they do?” said Lillian.

“Well, the Great Dane came out — the fawn one, you know, the brother of the black one — and the two of them sniffed each other’s front ends and back ends, then they went around, pissing on all the bushes. And then the greyhound mounted the Great Dane, and the Great Dane lay down and put both paws over his eyes, and the whole world was saved.”

Debbie said, “Oh, Dad!” and rolled her eyes, Tina looked a little confused but willing, and Tim and Dean laughed.

But it didn’t last. Only a week or two later, Arthur was getting up in the night and roaming the house again. Lillian knew it was because of what happened at the Bay of Pigs. She also knew his pattern now. He would sit in his study after work and stare out the window; then he would summon some sort of strength to get through an hour or so before going back into his study until bedtime. He would sleep for two or three hours and roam the house. After a while — this time it took two weeks — he would tell her something. He said, “We sprang it on them!”

“On who, Arthur?” They were sitting up in bed, half whispering in the darkness.

“On Bundy! On Kennedy!”

“I thought you meant Castro.”

“That’s the problem right there. Didn’t spring a thing on Castro! The Soviets had warned him. He knew more about it than I did. Dulles just went in to Kennedy and said, The operation is ready, it’s going to work, let’s do it — and he fell for it. It’s only April, for God’s sake. Half his staff is still looking for a place to hang their hats!”

“What now?”

“Well, I won’t be surprised if they disband the agency. The President is fit to be tied, and I don’t know what all.” He said this rather calmly, as if his whole career would not be destroyed, and so Lillian held her tongue, just to see what he would say next, if his first thought would be about herself and the children or about that other world he lived in. He blew out some air and groaned. Then he said, “Lillian, my darling, my dear, I want to tell you a story.”

Lillian felt herself get a little nervous, but she took his hand in hers and said, “Please do.” The closet door was open. She really wanted to get up and slide it closed, but she stayed put.

“Once upon a time,” said Arthur, “there was a woman named Sarah Cole DeRocher, and she was given in marriage to Second Lieutenant Brinks Manning not long after he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.”

“Your mother and father,” said Lillian.

“Sarah Cole was an only child of older parents. Her family had long resided in Macon, Georgia, and most of the uncles and aunts were ancient and unreconstructed loyalists to the Confederacy. They referred to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression. Marrying Lieutenant Brinks Manning in 1915, as he was preparing himself mentally for the probable American entry into the Great War, was an act of the highest rebellion for Sarah, and when he took her away to the North, her parents disinherited her — though from what, you have to ask yourself, since they had nothing. She was nineteen. But, darling, she was not Lillian Langdon, a girl with a job and some money and a large fund of vitality. She was a child, and within a year, she bore another child — not me, I am not suddenly forty-four years old, but a girl child that she named Sarah, after herself, a very unwise thing to do. And in the influenza epidemic of 1918, when my father was still far away in Europe, Sari, as my mother called her baby, died in the course of twenty-four hours. Life to death, breakfast to breakfast, here today and gone tomorrow.”

Lillian felt tears come to her eyes.

“When my father got back from the war, he was disappointed in his bride. He had grown up, and she had not. But, of course, that was then, and he made the best of it, and in due course, another child was born, little Arthur. I looked just like a Manning, and my father was deeply relieved. He was a military man. His specialty was equipment. He was proud of everything he knew about equipment, whether it was a machine or a horse. He could deploy a flock of pigeons, fix an engine. He was just like me — he despaired of the glamour boys who always had to run out ahead of the supply line because they were too impatient to wait. But he liked the army, the order of it, and he was a great patriot. Just like me.”

“Just like you, Arthur.”

“One day, my mother put me down for my nap. I was two and a half, and a good sleeper. She rocked me, held me, carried me to my bed, and then she covered me and told me to have a nice long sleep, that we would have cake for dinner. I remember every word.”